I'm used to feeling a variety of emotions when I walk into a new restaurant. Sometimes it's anticipation, sometimes dread; occasionally it's delight, too often it's "Christ, not beige again", but I wasn't really expecting the feeling that washed over me as I explored Marcus Waring's new restaurant, The Gilbert Scott - an unfamiliar upwelling of national pride.

I must have passed the long-rotting hulk of St Pancras station every day since I first moved to London in the 80s. There's never been a time when it's Ghormenghastly towers didn't jab the skyline in reproach to the city - a baleful reminder of the influence of local politicians, planning officers and developers. It seems to have taken forever but finally things have changed. The building has been properly restored, a model has been found that appears to fund the staggering expense and at the centre of this new gateway to Europe is a restaurant that can make an Englishman's heart soar.

It thrills me to think of a Frenchman arriving from Paris and stopping in for a bite. Staring, drop jawed at a dining room built like a battleship on cast iron ribs but decorated with such restrained Victorian elegance that his mere brasseries look meretricious in comparison. Reading a menu that celebrates a high point of British cuisine, not with vaguely embarrassed irony but with honest respect and all the skill one of our finest chefs brought to bear. The Gilbert Scott, in a marvellously British way, does all the things on which the French used to have a monopoly … only better.

When I am king there will be one of these things in every port and station. We'll tear down the minging pasty shacks, the "coffee" wagons, the evil and unhygienic sandwich shanties. We'll overturn the tables at the appalling "Plane Food" and the unappetising stew of cod-international franchises at the airport and put up temples to British food to greet our guests.

Perhaps it's not just us. Apart from a single occasion when I landed on a remote airstrip somewhere in Africa and somebody handed me a cold beer, I can't remember when I've arrived in a new country and been properly greeted with their best food. The Paris end of the Eurostar offers a culinary welcome similar to Aberystwyth; the gorgeous fascist monstrosity of Venice's railway station disgorges you from sticky seat to vaporetto without so much as a cheese roll; impossibly romantic sounding Geneva airport tempts with a gas-flushed ham-a-like eurobap and coffee that could eat its way through your stomach wall.

The Gilbert Scott seems to me a stake in the ground. A kind of rally-round-the-flag-boys, desperate last stand against a roaring surge of "international" mediocrity. What's your experience been of eating at stations, ports and airports? Are there any international gateways that truly welcome the hungry, thirsty traveller?